The family connection endures with Malcolm, who became Brown’s guitar player for gigs about 20 years ago, leading to occasional songwriting collaborations. “I was very proud of it – it was my farewell to him.” “Jack told me he wanted it to be ‘an old man’s record’,” Brown remembers. The Brown-Bruce partnership went on pause after another falling out following Bruce’s 2003 release More Jack Than God, but Bruce, suffering from liver disease, called a truce and called up Brown to collaborate on what was to be his final release, 2014’s Silver Rails. “Sometimes we had to have a rest from each other – two very big personalities in the same room sometimes wasn’t good, plus his addictions got in the way.” Nevertheless, the partnership endured on every Jack Bruce solo release (except the instrumental second album Things We Like), while Brown fronted a series of other groups, produced records by some of his contemporaries such as Heckstall-Smith and Peter Green, and eventually wrote a memoir, 2010’s White Rooms and Imaginary Westerns. Cream split up in 1968 and the Bruce-Brown partnership continued, but not without the occasional challenges. “When I was very young he would be at the house all the time.” ![]() “I’ve known Pete my whole life,” reflects Malcolm Bruce, whose mother Janet Godfrey also co-wrote Sleepy Time Time and Sweet Wine on Cream’s debut, Fresh Cream. “I had the actual freakout in the actual white room,” Brown clarifies, saying he returned to the room to write the song, as “a sort of woodshedding post-drug experience”. Getting more involved in music was very healing for me – I don’t know what I would have done without it.” The experience also left behind another Cream classic, White Room, the meaning of which – it begins “in the white room with black curtains near the station / Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings” – has been fervently debated. “I had a lot of shakes, panic attacks and claustrophobia,” Brown remembers. The experience had a lot of nasty after-effects. I realised that my body was trying to tell me something and more or less got straight overnight.” I had visions of my brain coming out of my ears and nose like mince meat and things and that. “I had some very bad experiences with drugs and alcohol,” Brown says, describing a harrowing post-gig incident: “I had just done too much of everything and I became paralysed for a couple of hours. Photograph: Philippe Gras/Alamyīrown wrote lyrics for Cream classics such as Sunshine of Your Love, I Feel Free and Dance the Night Away, a song inspired by Brown’s move to sobriety in 1967. ‘I had some very bad experiences with drugs and alcohol’ … Brown performing in 1970. Chemistry was immediate: Brown and Bruce formed a writing partnership that blossomed through the Cream years and beyond. Then in 1965, Ginger Baker, another Graham Bond Organisation player, invited Brown to help finish the first Cream single, Wrapping Paper, with him and Bruce. ![]() He held down a jazz poetry residency at Soho’s now-legendary Marquee Club, fronted the Pete Brown Poetry Band with guitarist John McLaughlin (later a key Miles Davis collaborator) and toured with Bond’s R&B outfit the Graham Bond Organisation. They were very important in my life because they were bigger than life.”īrown was already a well-established jazz poet in the early 60s backed by the top musicians in the British jazz scene, as well as the nascent blues and R&B circuits, before becoming a lyricist and singer. “I’ve always been interested in ghosts,” Brown says, “especially musical ghosts, and also by certain presences such as Graham Bond and Dick Heckstall-Smith and people like that. Shadow Club’s after-hours vibe is a nostalgic tribute to the sweaty clubs and their artists during the British R&B boom that Brown came from in the mid-1960s. “It’s the first time I’ve ever done a record with a proper budget, and with two great producers, so it’s a new departure for me,” he says. “Maybe we should replace that!” Brown sits on the sofa listening intently. “There’s a bit of Jack Bruce there,” jokes Malcolm mid-riff. The bass guitar of Malcolm Bruce – Jack’s son – is being overdubbed to Brown singing Shadow Club, the title track of his new album, slated for an October release.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |